Surviving Superheroism
by spiderstan0spiderstan
Summary: Five small ways Tony Stark helped Peter Parker survive super-heroism, and one time Peter helped him. (forgot to transfer this from Ao3 when I wrote it in 2016)
1. Chapter 1

The suit was amazing, just, amazing. Peter didn't know what it was made of, but it felt like a million dollars. Literally a million. He'd had a chance to touch aerogel, once, and it was the same feeling. It felt like science.

Science and money.

It was made to measure, too, skintight, which was a little weird, because when had there been time for that? Maybe Mr. Stark had eyeballed it, which made sense, because he was probably the most intelligent man alive. And he financed and designed for the other Avengers, so he probably knew a lot about textiles. The suit was light, what athletic brands called 'Breathable'.

Peter slipped on the gloves, which fit like, well, gloves , and stuck his hand to his the wall. He could cling through the gloves, which seemed like a good sign. That had been his biggest worry.

The boots were amazingly lightweight, barely heavier than socks. The soles were hard enough to protect his feet, but thin enough for his powers to work through.

Which he tested by sprinting up a wall.

Not even crawling, which would have been much more sensible, but just running . Up the wall of a hangar, because he was clever like that, then on to the ceiling. The quinjet was black below him, shining in the evening light.

Peter swung into a sitting position on the ceiling, and tried to process everything. He was dressed in a head-to-toe engineering miracle. He was about to fight alongside the Avengers. With...other Avengers. Which was weird, and exciting, and couldn't properly be expressed in language. He couldn't really picture it. He could maybe handle the concept of one Avenger being in the same room as him, because that'd happened , or two, like at a press conference or something, but all of them? That was too much. That was a dream come true.

And also, Black Widow would be there, on their team , which he almost certainly couldn't handle. She was both a superhero and a woman, two of the most awe-striking types of people on Earth. If she spoke to him at any point, Peter would actually die . He might die from being near her. She was attractive enough to give someone a heart attack. Quite a few of the Avengers were, actually. At least Captain America had the decency to wear a mask.

But he'd be okay, if he could stay calm about it, because he was dressed for battle. Armed. Prepared. He looked like a superhero, and he was pretty sure he was better armoured than he'd ever been in his life. He was about to meet- on the battlefield, but it was still technically meeting- the Avengers.

Thank god for Tony Stark.


	2. Chapter 2

Flying back to America was something of a nightmare.

Tony had a private plane, and was staying in Europe with Vision and War Machine. Black Panther- who had been just amazing - was going back to Wakanda. That left Peter and Black Widow, all on their own, in a plane with a kitchenette . And bedrooms, plural .

Black Widow had vanished into the back of the plane minutes after they took off. So Peter wouldn't have to reveal his identity, which was really nice of her.

Peter had picked out a bed, hunted down pillows, and established himself. He'd catalogued his injuries- concussion, cracked - maybe broken- ribs, and some kind of horrible, bone-damaging variant of a black eye, all ganging up and overwhelming his healing factor. It hurt to breathe. Hand-sized bruises covered his chest, darkest around the sorest parts. He'd been slightly, irritatingly nauseated since he'd come to on the tarmac, and flying was making it worse.

His fault, for swinging directly into the waving hand of a giant.

He was trying to work out whether to go hunting for painkillers or not. Was it worth it?

At hour one of nine, his phone rang.

"Peter!" Tony Stark had called him. His phone really should have been in airplane mode. Why wasn't it in airplane mode? "God, kid, are you okay?"

"I'm, I'm, uh-" Peter stammered. "I. I'm a bit concussed. Um, not, not badly though! Only a tiny bit concussed, I promise."

"You were unconscious ." Tony said.

"I, uh, also probably broke some ribs?" Peter was dying inside, just a tad. "And maybe an orbit. There's like a fifty fifty chance on the, the,intactness of my orbit."

He probably wouldn't be allowed to keep working. Mr. Stark would ring up his Aunt and tell her about his super-shenanigans, and then he'd be grounded forever, and it would be terrible, and-

The plane hit turbulence.

Peter dropped his phone and bolted.

He ended up puking in the kitchenette sink, which definitely wasn't ideal, but was better than most of the other options. But it hurt. He'd thought his ribs had hurt before. He'd been wrong, extremely wrong, holy hell .

He rinsed out his mouth with a handful of water, and left the faucet on, then picked up his phone again.

"Um." He said. "Sorry?"

"Did you just throw up?" It was an accusation, not a question. "On my plane?"

"I threw up in the sink, and I am so, so sorry, " Peter said. "I, well, it's my fault I got hurt, but, but, it's not, uh, not, standard -"

"Jesus christ, kid. I'm not angry with you. It was a hard fight and you're new to this." Tony answered. "Medical will be waiting for you on the ground, in case you don't heal over the flight. Where's Natasha?"

"I dunno. Sleeping?" Peter suggested. He didn't want to go looking.

"I'll just- don't panic, okay?" Tony asked. "You can handle this if I tell you where everything is, right? I can call Natasha if you want me to."

"Yeah." Peter said. "I can, um, I'll deal.

"Okay," Tony began. "There's a first aid kit in the cabinet on the wall, and ice machine under the counter next to the sink..."


	3. Chapter 3

Peter was tired.

Not intolerably tired, just tired enough for things to be… weird.

He was trying to write a report, 'cause, reports. Reports were important. The only difference between science and screwing around was writing it down. He'd been doing science.

Dissolvant science.

Because webs were basically glue. Messy, long-range glue.

He'd swung in from patrol and gotten to work, never mind it being two in the morning. He had stuff to do. He'd had a test to study for last night, so he had to make it up now.

He really needed to stop missing class time. He could teach himself almost an entire course in a night, but at what cost?

He had to finish his report. Or else… his internship would end and he wouldn't get into MIT and he would die.

Had he written about the carpet tests?

He scrolled back up through his google doc. He'd written about the carpet tests. Thank god.

Coffee would be good. Yeah. Coffee. Caffeine. There was a coffee machine...somewhere. Out there in the maze that was Stark tower.

He escaped the lab and his mountains of notes, and tiptoed upstairs to the residential-level kitchen, holding his phone out as a makeshift flashlight. The tower was silent and dark.

In the corner of his eye, something glowed. It moved.

Peter reacted in a very rational way: He scrambled up the wall and flattened himself against the ceiling. Because that was a normal startle response and wouldn't reveal his secret identity at all.

He decided to stay on the ceiling, anyway. Just in case.

The lights flicked on.

Tony Stark was standing in the doorway, stifling a yawn. Peter had never seen him in a t-shirt before, and he looked oddly… un stark-ish. Messy.

Tony shuffled across the kitchen, muttering under his breath to F.R.I.D.A.Y.

He started the coffee machine with a thumbprint. It whirred, clicked, and output a steaming mug of whatever ratio of coffee/milk/water/sugar was programmed to Tony's finger.

"That is so cool." Peter blurted. "How'd you even do that? Biometrics I get, but in a coffee machine?"

Tony dropped his cup, which exploded into shards on the marble floor.

"Holy shit!" He said, . "What are you doing up there? Wait, what are you doing awake?"

"Um…" Peter considered dropping to the floor, then decided against adding injury to insult. "I was doing a write up-"

"On my ceiling ," Tony said. "At four in the morning ."

"No, I just," Peter stammered. "I gotta finish my write-up. On...not the ceiling."

"Then why- nevermind." Tony started picking up the chunks of broken mug. "Go to bed. You can do your write-up later, I don't care, just- go to sleep!"

"You do this all the time, though." Peter said. "You've stayed awake for like...days."

"Do as I say, not as I do," Tony said. "And I need less sleep than you. You're gonna mess up your neural development. There's no point in doing write-ups if you ruin that beautiful brain of yours with a sleep disorder."

"Okay." Peter found a point on the floor without broken ceramic, and dropped into a rather awkward landing.

"Sweet dreams," Tony called as he left. "Please don't make me set you a bedtime, that would be incredibly weird."


	4. Chapter 4

There was something a little traumatic about having your hair fall out.

It started coming out in tufts, clinging to the inside of his mask, clogging shower drains. That was terrifying.

Peter was pretty sure it was a super- x issue, something with his DNA, but he didn't know what . Didn't spiders have more hair, anyway?

So he went to Tony about it, because Tony had resources. Tony had buildings full of labs, and scientists who were sworn to secrecy.

Tony responded by, in a word, freaking out and buying a medical team. And also more scientists, because Peter feeling a bit unwell was a million-dollar venture.

Because normal medical knowledge didn't apply to him anymore.

And he was banned from spiderman...ing. Spidering-man? His job . He was doomed to loitering around Stark Tower, poking at science things and getting reprimanded for poking at science things by .

He was poking an A.I, in fact, when things first got really scary. One moment he was trying to get Dum-E to roughly approximate the cha-cha slide, because he was going to die of boredom without anything to do, and the next he was blinking awake to the blurry ceiling and screeching robots.

"Mister Parker!" F.R.I.D.A.Y was yelling. When had she become the omnipresent robo-voice in the ceiling?"Are you alright? Do you want me to alert Mister Stark?"

"No, no, I'm-" Peter sat up, stared at his shoes. "Did I just faint ?"

"It would appear so," F.R.I.D.A.Y said. "This is probably linked to your recent...condition."

"Yeah, uh…" Peter bit his nails and tried not to panic. "What do we know about that?"

"It doesn't seem to be pathogenic." If a programme could have a soothing tone, F.R.I.D.A.Y did. "Your vitals are normal, by your standards. You'll probably have a diagnosis by the end of the week, based on the blood tests. Would you like me to contact one of your doctors?"

"Nope, I'm fine." Peter got to his feet, if only to shut the beeping dum-e up. "I think."

He had a couple more fainting fits before diagnosis. One in school, which was all kinds of embarrassing.

The news was delivered over the phone, because Tony Stark was Tony Stark and it was four in the morning. Peter woke up to his phone tinnily bleeping out the chorus to Mr Roboto, and dragged it across the end table to answer.

"Hi?" He said.

"You're anemic, Petey." Tony said, forgoing a greeting. "Among other things."

"'M what ?" Peter tried to rub the sleep out of his eyes.

"You're malnourished." Tony answered. "You know that thing you have, where you have super-strength, and a healing factor, and superhuman senses, and an enhanced metabolism?"

"Mm-hmm." Peter tried to be at least half awake. "Did...uh…"

"You burn through nutrients just under twice as fast as a normal person." Tony said. "Which is why you're deficient in a veritable alphabet of vitamins and minerals. Same thing happens to Steve, actually, but faster."

"Steve?" Peter mumbled, half into his pillow. "Oh, Captain America?"

"Yup," Tony said. "You're probably running close enough to normal that we can just work on your diet, but until then, maybe two weeks- supplements . I hope you like taking pills. And nutritionists. You're getting a nutritionist."

"Okay. Nutrition," Peter said. "Can...Can I go back to sleep now?"

"Sure," Tony said. "It's a school night, isn't it? We wouldn't have this problem if you would just-"

Peter hung up.


	5. Chapter 5

They were gonna find him out soon enough. Several terrifying and obsessive fansites had sprung up around him.

The most worrying was r/spideysightings, which was cataloguing his area and range of action, one photo at a time. Not on purpose, but they could definitely be used for that. Every picture gave a street name at least.

Peter flicked through the pages on his tablet. R/spideysightings, a few news outlets, the spideywatch twitter, and the aptly-named . He had a few mentions in sites focused on the Avengers, or New York itself.

He wasn't worried, not yet, because all of their estimates were way, way, off, but he could see this being a problem. Theorising on his identity seemed to be a hobby among crazy online folks. So far he'd been suspected of having a wife and kids, suspected of being an alien, and, in maybe the weirdest theory, suspected of being a girl . Apparently he was too small to be a spider- man , and never talked on TV to hide his voice. The last point was kinda true, but still .

The theories were out there, but they knew where he was active and when. If someone zeroed in on his school...

He only knew because Tony had handed him a tablet and told him to find himself , meaning to flip through all the creepy ways people on the internet showed their love. There were stories, too, all sorts of speculation and dramatization-

"What can we do ?" Peter asked.

"Introduce-" Tony was halfway through reassembling one of his creations. "Introduce confounding variables. Maybe start a scandal."

"Why? Wouldn't that make things worse?" Peter asked. "And how?"

"Well, if I'm seen with, say," Tony adjusted a screw. "A dark-haired youth in a, what's a good art school? An art school hoodie, paint on his hands, sunglasses to hide his face- that's a scandal and a half. Especially if we have a similar dynamic to how we act in costume."

"But I don't have dark hair," Peter said. "I don't look like you at all."

"We'll dye it, jeez." Tony said. "And out you in some decent clothes, then go for, like, ice cream or something. I'll just say you're a foundation intern once everything goes to shit."

"So this helps by making people think..?"

"Spider-man is my kid," Tony said. "That I have a kid. Who is also probably spider-man. We can do it right after whatever our next team-up is."

By the end of the month they had the tabloids a few photos had been taken, but they were everywhere . Every newspaper, every magazine, every website.

Peter was amazed by how different he looked, in fancy clothes and coached body language. He looked taller. The designer labels and paint-spattered NYU zip-up hung better than anything he looked like a billionaire's kid.

Anthony Elliott-Jones, nineteen-year-old graphic designer and digital artist, was driven off social media by the drama after being identified and suspected. First in the dead-end paternity scandal, and then of being Spider-Man.

Peter was safe.


	6. Chapter 6

Tony was woken up at eight in the morning, which wouldn't have been so bad if he had fallen asleep before six. The criminal underworld came alive in an exact inverse of normal working hours.

Who was even awake at eight in the morning? Who would be in his penthouse at eight in the morning?

"Um, Mister Stark…" Peter Parker, who apparently drew his energy from the suffering of others, was shaking Tony's shoulder, leaning against the breakfast bar he'd crashed on."Sorry to wake you, but you do kinda have to be in the air in... an hour and a half? Roughly? Do you want eggs? I'm gonna make eggs, if that's okay?"

"Sure," Tony said. "Don't you have school?"

"It's summer break." The resident wunderkind replied, digging through the fridge. "Ooh, there's bacon! Do you want bacon?"

"Why not." Tony shrugged. "Why are you...here, though? If you're on vacation, and not coming with me?"

The horrendously publicised debate probably would have benefited from Peter's perspective, but being on tv might 'let people identify his voice' and 'compromise his secret identity', because Peter was the most paranoid teenager alive.

"Well," Peter cracked two eggs into a sizzling frying pan. "You were doing digitizations, right? Of all those photos and tapes down in storage. I was thinking I could...help."

"Help?" Tony said. "Do you even know what a vcr is?"

" Yes… " Peter protested. "We learn about them in electronics."

"But can you use one?" The kid wasn't even alive when DVDs hit the shelves. Nothing had released on VHS since he was seven.

"Yes!" Peter insisted, adding bacon to the pan. "I like retro tech!"

"Retro tech," Tony said. "The last VHS movie was released in 2007, and you think that's retro tech ?"

"I was eight months old when the ipod came out." Peter said.

"Ugh. Stop." Tony said, tapping his thumb to the biometric coffee machine.

"The first macbook released when I was in kindergarten. " Peter was grinning, the little shit.

"You're making me feel incredibly old," Tony said. "It's demoralizing ."

"No offence, but you are incredibly old." Peter flipped the eggs in one smooth movement. "You came out as iron man when I was seven ."

Peter had reached a point on his familiarity/snarkiness curve that Tony was starting to dislike.

"And I should let a toddler like yourself at my records why , exactly?" Tony took a sip of his coffee, cursed the person who'd scheduled the summit. The media apparently hated him; his entire day was structured to maximise their schadenfreude.

"'Cause nobody else you know has high enough clearance and is willing to play through eight bajillion home videos?" Peter suggested. "In alphabetical slash chronological order? While taking breaks to fight crime?"

"Are you sassing me?" Tony asked. "Don't sass me. I can still get you grounded."

"Okay, jeez," Peter said. "But I can do the digitization thing, right? I wanna help while you're yelling at Captain America.."

Leaving Peter in charge of anything was a little daunting. He was a perfectly good superhero , but admin was not usually a strong point for hyperactive teenagers.

"I'm not gonna stop you," Tony said, "But I didn't tell you to do it, so if you break something it's not my responsibility."

"Yes sir!" Peter mocked a salute with his non-spatula hand. "If there's anything else I can do, just email me. I'm happy to help, really!"

"This is still going to be listed as an internship on your college applications, y'know."

"It's worth it." Peter said. "Just to, like, to help."

At least the kid had integrity.


End file.
